862 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Cassius. Zsigmondy says, " I look upon 

 the knowledge that a mixture of colloid 

 bodies can behave, under some condi- 

 tions, as a chemical compound, and that 

 the properties of one body in such mix- 

 tures can be hidden by those in another 

 as the most important conclusion to be 

 drawn from this work." 



The Abuse of TJnskilled Labor. — 

 The number of diseases directly or indi- 

 rectly due to continued long standing 

 is especially numerous among women. 

 The London Lancet, which nearly twen- 

 ty years ago attempted to improve mat- 

 ters in this respect in the case of shop- 

 girls, has again taken up the subject, 

 and recently published an editorial urg- 

 ing customers of the shops to boycott 

 those establishments where no sitting 

 accommodations are provided for the 

 clerks. It says: "We, as medical men, 

 maintain that sitting accommodations 

 arc absolutely necessary for shopgirls. 

 The only argument having even the sem- 

 blance of legitimacy which we have heard 

 put forward in defense of the nonprovi- 

 sion of seats is that sitting is conducive 

 to idleness, but in this connection such a 

 premise can not be permitted, for an em- 

 ployee would be bound to come forward 

 when an intending piu'chaser entered the 

 shop. . . . The very fact that in many 

 shops she is not allowed to sit down is 

 conducive to idleness — idleness of the 

 worst kind, the idleness of pretending to 

 do something while in reality nothing is 

 being done. Can nothing be done to 

 stop this — as we once called it without 

 the least exaggeration or sensationalism 

 — 'cruelty to women'? To the true 

 woman — the woman with feelings for 

 her sisters, the woman of love and sym- 

 pathy, the true woman in every sense of 

 the word — we appeal for help in this 

 matter. If such women would abstain 

 from purchasing at shops where they see 

 that the employees are compelled to 

 work from morning till night without 

 permission to rest from their labors even 

 when opportunity occurs, we should 

 soon see the end of a practice which 

 ruins the health and shortens the lives 

 of many of our shopgirls." That there 

 is a certain amount of danger for women 

 from long-continued standing, to the 

 point of exhaustion, there is no doubt, 

 and much can be done toward improv- 

 ing the present conditions in this respect 



and in other hygienic ways in the shops. 

 The large influx of women during recent 

 years into the counting-room and the 

 salesroom gives such questions an in- 

 creasing importance, especially in the 

 less skilled positions where labor com- 

 binations for mutual protection are not 

 possible. There has already been con- 

 siderable agitation of the question in 

 this country, and there still remains 

 much to be done. But, as Lord Salis- 

 bury pointed out in causing the rejec- 

 tion of a bill for remedying present shop 

 conditions in England, it is a question 

 not suitable for legislation, and can only 

 be settled through the indirect action of 

 public opinion on the shopkeeper him- 

 self. 



The Occurrence of Gold Ores. — 



The following paragraphs are from an 

 article by H. M. Chance in the Engineer- 

 ing Magazine for July, entitled The In- 

 creasing Production of Gold : " Another 

 reason for anticipating further increase 

 in the production of gold is found in our 

 better knowledge of gold ores, and of the 

 conditions under which gold occurs in 

 Nature. Until the discovery of the Crip- 

 ple Creek district the occurrence of gold 

 as tellurid in deposits of large extent 

 and value was practically unknown. 

 Gold was, of course, known to occur, 

 sparingly in some ores, partially as a 

 tellurid associated with other minerals; 

 but such a mineralized belt as that at 

 Cripple Creek was entirely unknown, 

 and such deposits were not looked for by 

 the prospector. Similarly, we now know 

 of another class of gold ores in which the 

 gold occurs apparently in some form 

 chemically combined in a siliceous ma- 

 trix, often approaching a true jasper or 

 hornstone, and showing by analysis pos- 

 sibly ninety-five per cent of silica. Such 

 ores show no trace of ' free ' or metallic 

 gold, and the presence of gold can be 

 determined only by assay or analysis. 

 A few such discoveries have recently 

 been made, accidentally, by inexperi- 

 enced persons, who had rock assayed 

 from curiosity. Similarly again, in the 

 last few years gold has been found 

 in most unpromising-looking porphyry 

 dikes — the very rocks prospectors the 

 world over have regarded as necessarily 

 barren because they almost invariably 

 fail to show any ' free ' or metallic gold 

 by the miner's quick ' horn ' or * pan ' 



